Darkstone
Elvenhome
Aug 9 2011, 6:41pm
Views: 1380
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Are they really mistakes of the authors?
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First of all I find it hard to believe Tolkien wrote anything he hadn't meant to write so he must have been fully aware of the meaning.
Tolkien loved to collect idioms and spring them on his friends so maybe it was a then current idiom of the sort that inverts the true meaning, like "I could care less" (originally "I couldn't care less") or "cheap at half the price" (originally "cheap at twice the price"). In any case, as squire points out, the context makes the intent clear.
Or maybe Gandalf was being logically sarcastic, such as "I should be so lucky!" (meaning "I have no hope of being so lucky”) or "Tell me about it!" (meaning “Don’t tell me about it, because I know all about it already”). Note that such sarcastic inversion is common in Yiddish culture, and Tolkien mentioned on at least two occasions that Jewish and Dwarvish cultures shared many similarities. Perhaps this sort of humorous inversion is one of them and so his "mistake" is actually him speaking to the Dwarves in (as Sir Launcelot would say) their own particular idiom?
Or maybe Tolkien was parodying the typical trope in pulp fiction that a one-in-a-million chance is a sure thing. That is, "if there's a million to one chance against something of vital importance happening in a story, then this is going to be that one time it actually happens rather than the other 999,999 times." So trope-wise Gandalf *is* correct in that if there are 999,999 chances out of a million that the Dwarves will find their way back to the path, this story is about the one-in-a-million chance they don't! (So this is a subtle tongue-in-cheek breaking of the fourth wall, like Bombadil's "Tell me, who are you alone, yourself and nameless?")
Or maybe Tolkien just wanted to show Gandalf wasn't perfect.
In any case, if it was a mistake, it wasn't Tolkien's, it was Gandalf's.
As for the Algernon-Gordon Effect, remember that Charlie Gordon posited it while his artificially-induced intellect was indeed rapidly deteriorating (and to a lower IQ than he started with to boot), so I'll forgive him any mistakes.
Again, as with The Hobbit, the mistake wan't author Daniel Keyes', but the character Charlie Gordon's.
Good question, though. And welcome back to the forums! You were missed!
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Brothers, sisters,
I was Elf once.
We danced together
Under the Two Trees.
We sang as the soft gold of Laurelin
And the bright silver of Telperion,
Brought forth the dawn of the world.
Then I was taken.
Brothers, sisters,
In my torment I kept faith,
And I waited.
But you never came.
And when I returned you drew sword,
And when I called your names you drew bow.
Was my Eldar beauty all,
And my soul nothing?
So be it.
I will return your hatred,
And I am hungry.
(This post was edited by Darkstone on Aug 9 2011, 6:43pm)
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